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Expertise Summary

My research is focused within the 18th and 19th centuries, and has dealt with French material, and also Rome. Topics I have worked on include iconoclasm, various aspects of the visual culture of the French Revolution, Italian travel (especially to and in Rome). My current work centres on questions of health, disease, and hygiene, and their significance in shaping in material and metaphorical terms the experience of Rome; a particular aspect of this project is to reassess the Roman landscape as a subject for visual representation.

I have recently edited two volumes of essays, Regarding Romantic Rome (Peter Lang, 2007), and Cinematic Rome (Troubadour, 2008), and curated Ruination, an exhibition for the Djanogly Gallery (Feb.-April 2008). I have recently completed a book, Roman Fever: influence, infection, and the image of Rome (Yale Univ. Press). My future plans are to complete articles on: the origins of the flâneur; the critical reception of Ingres' Monsieur Bertin; and the phenomenon of incognito travel, and to develop a project with the working title 'After Piranesi', on the evolving representation of Rome in the early 19th century, with particular reference to the impact of photography, more specifically the work of the great Rome-based Scottish Robert Macpherson.

Supervision

I would be interested in supervising research projects on French art across the 18th and 19th centuries, especially ones to do with travel, criticism, the Salon, academic art, and representations and experience of Italy.

Research Summary

A new history of the flâneur, considered in terms of its origins in early nineteenth-century Paris, and the relationship of this to the arcades (passages). I've begun to publish on this (see… read more

Current Research

A new history of the flâneur, considered in terms of its origins in early nineteenth-century Paris, and the relationship of this to the arcades (passages). I've begun to publish on this (see Publications).

I'm also developing research on photographs of and in 19th-century Rome, with particular reference to Robert Macpherson.

More specifically, I am trying to finish articles on the early lithographs by Charles Philipon, and on Ingres's portrait of Monsieur Bertin and its critical and art-historical reception.